NEW YORK, NY/9/24/07Random House will publish a new book by Norman Mailer next month, it was announced September 24 by Gina Centrello, President and Publisher of the Random House Publishing Group. The book, ON GOD: AN UNCOMMON CONVERSATION, will be released on October 16.

“Norman has been one of the most influential literary artists of the last sixty years. ON GOD shows a master still wrestling with the largest questions of what it means to be human. This book is like Norman himself: there is no one like him in American literature. It’s brilliant, original, irreverent, and full of insight and compassion,” said Centrello.

A towering figure in American literature, Norman Mailer has in recent years reached a new level of accessibility and power. His latest novel, THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST, revealed fascinating ideas about faith and the nature of good and evil. Now Mailer offers his concept of the nature of God. His Platonic dialogues with his friend and literary executor, Michael Lennon, show this writer at his most direct, provocative, and challenging. I think, says Mailer, that piety is oppressive. It takes all the air out of thought.

In probing, amusing, and uncommon dialogues conducted over three years but whose topics he has considered for decades, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of contrary powers in the universe, with whom war is waged for the souls of humans. In turn, we have been given freedom­indeed responsibility­to choose our own paths. Mailer trusts that our individual behavior­always a complex mix of good and evil­will be rewarded or punished with a reincarnation that fits the sum of our lives.

Mailer weighs the possibilities of intelligent design at the same time avowing that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments­because adultery, he avers, may be a lesser evil than others suffered in a bad marriage­and he holds that technology was the Devils most brilliant creation.

In short, Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring verbal journey, a unique vision of the world in which God needs us as much as we need God.

From The Naked and the Dead to The Executioners Song and beyond, Mailers major works have engaged such themes as war, politics, culture, and sex. Now, in this short yet important book, Mailer, in a modest, well-spoken style, gives us fresh ways to think about the largest subject of them all.

About the Authors

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioners Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlots Ghost; Oswalds Tale; The Gospel According to the Son; and The Castle in the Forest. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his wife, the novelist Norris Church Mailer.

Michael Lennon is emeritus vice president and emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University. He has published widely on Norman Mailer, including (with Donna Pedro Lennon) Norman Mailer: Works and Days, and edited several of Mailers works, including Pontifications, Conversations with Norman Mailer, and The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing.